In the digital era, the fast developing digital technology is like a double edge sword. On one hand, it gives the people a powerful tool to make life easier and work more efficient, but unfortunately on the other hand, it also provides the criminal with a powerful tool to commit crimes in more sophisticated ways.
Today every company depends on its databases, networks, and connection to the Internet to create, store, and transfer information. Internal and external communication is the basis for most business processes, and within this communication there is an inherent risk of fraud and forgery. Today, every document that contains information can be forged or manipulated by using digital technologies and methods. The criminal activities of counterfeiting, piracy and fraud are on the rise due to readily available software, inexpensive printing and imaging technologies are used to create fraudulent documents or alter digital images. The crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and piracy have brought serious negative impact on human life and business with huge economic loss. These crimes have become even worse since the early 20th century. By one industry estimate, more than 1,000 people a day in the United States fall victim to crimes of stolen identity. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, there are over 400,000 thefts of identity each year with annual losses of more than $2 Billion. Besides forgery products, piracy of copyright and counterfeiting documents are another major problems for the time being. The amount of money that consumers are also losing due to Internet fraud is increasing seriously. Reducing the number of incidences and severity of fraud becomes a prerequisite for success for companies of all sizes.
It is difficult to learn how to protect the high value and confidential data in a computer system effectively than to break into it. It is really a great challenge to find an ultimate solution with digital high technology to be able to prevent from crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and piracy that unsecured digital technology allows.
For the time being, there are many kinds of technology and apparatus in the fields of anti counterfeiting, encryption and authentication, such as “Ciphering and deciphering device” (U.S. Pat. No. 4,972,481, issued on Nov. 20, 1990); “Encrypting conversion apparatus, decrypting conversion apparatus, cryptographic communication system, and electronic toll collection apparatus” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,683,956, issued on Jan. 27, 2004); “Method for the secure handling of monetary or value units using prepaid data carriers” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,745,940, issued on Jun. 8, 2004); “Certification apparatus and method” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,748,530, issued on Jun. 8, 2004); “Cryptographic apparatus and methods (U.S. Pat. No. 4,200,700, issued on Apr. 29, 1980); “Method and computer program product for hiding information in an indexed color image” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,519,352, issued on Feb. 11, 2003); “Large capacity steganography” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,473,516 issued on Oct. 29, 2002); “Computer system linked by using information in data objects” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,553,129 issued on Apr. 22, 2003) and many others that are either patented or not patented. Certainly, each of them has some good functions and features that have some effect in protecting the data from the crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and piracy. However, there are still a number of problems in the current related technologies, apparatuses or methods. Some are not easy to use, some are too expensive to afford due to complicated supporting hardware and some are not powerful enough to prevent from the crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and piracy.
The good technologies and apparatus should have the features to able to protect any data in any kind of format effectively from the crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and piracy, i.e. unique, infeasible to break, impossible to forgery and cost-effective.
One of the important components of these technologies and apparatus is the encryption technology that plays a very key role in making the related technologies or tools with the highest level of security. In terms of encryption, identification, confidentiality, integration and authentication are four key conditions of a good and ideal encryption technology. The conventional encryption technologies such as DES, RSA, AES, PGP and others only meet with the parts of required conditions instead of all.
Along with the rapid development of computer technology, steganography as another new kind of encryption technology becomes more popular recently. But the main limitation of the steganography is its hiding capacity. Many can only hide about 15% of the original data, and very few may provide hiding capacities in excess of 50% of the original data. By now none of steganographic methods have an enough power to hide a data of up to 100%. This seriously limits the application scope of the steganographic methods. Besides hiding capacity, the security strength of the steganographic methods is still weak because the steganography mainly depends on the human vision system, so it hardly stops the astute hacker to break it. Thus, neither traditional encryption technologies and methods nor steganography methods are able to lead us to a best solution.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to find a new alternative solution that provides a system of information matrix cryptogram that can protect any data in any kind of format from the crimes of forgery, counterfeiting and pirating in an effective way.
It is another object of the present invention to design a special information matrix that can store any data file in any of kind of format. The information data matrix looks like a regular bitmap image, but actually it is a special coded data matrix as a cryptogram. It hides the original data in an information matrix cryptogram that is infeasible to break. The format of the data in the cryptogram will be totally different from its original format.
It is another object of the present invention to use a proprietary data allocation method to put the original data into a special data matrix that are ready for being compressed by using a lossless compressing technology such as LZ77, LZ78, LZW or others. It will have a good control of the size of data matrix without losing any information of the original data.
It is another object of the prevent invention to use a proprietary method to encrypt the data in a special coded information matrix. The IMC encryption technology will swap the columns and the rows in the data matrix in a totally random way at least 128 times or up to 1024 times according to the user's required level of strength of the encryption. In this way, the data matrix where the data is stored is converted into a cryptogram in a completely new format. The data in the cryptogram is protected in a very confidential and secured way. There will be no way to trace or decode the cryptogram without the right decoder key.
It is another object of the present invention to generate and append a unique authentic code to the cryptogram by using a special method with SHA-1 or SHA-256 or SHA-512 or any other similar technologies and store the authentic code to the last row of the special data matrix. Thus the decoder key can identify and authenticate the origin of the data reliably.
It is another object of the present invention to create a set of unique multi symmetric security key systems for different purposes. It comprises of three types of the security key systems, i.e. One-to-Many security key system for general use; One-to-One security key system for top confidential data and private use; Associated security key system for anti piracy and other special purpose.
It is another object of the present invention to design a special delivery system for transmitting security keys of the encoder or the decoder or their associated ID and password for decoding the steganographic image that is processed with special codes.
Furthermore, it is another object of the invention to allow the user to have many flexible applicable options that not only make many kind of products for different purposes to protect any data in any kind of format effectively, but also reduce the cost significantly.